Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

by Helen Rappaport

  In such close contact with the family, day in, day out, the inevitable had happened. The Romanovs and their young captors had developed the classic prisoner–jailer bonds so common in such situations. Some of the guards had found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the gentle, kindly face of Nicholas and his pretty daughters with the one that Bolshevik propaganda had inculcated in them. The three younger girls by now had become open and friendly to the point of flirtatiousness with some of them. They took any and every opportunity of talking and sharing jokes and cups of tea; given the levels of boredom they were enduring, this is not surprising. Their eldest sister Olga, however, did not mix. Now painfully thin and sickly, she had been withdrawing increasingly into a state of melancholy for months. As for the Tsaritsa, she was another matter altogether. Cold, reserved, bitterly proud and defensive of her privacy, she was hostile towards the guards and unrelentingly argumentative about complying with any of the commandant’s house rules. She refused point blank to ring the bell that the family were supposed to use every time they wished to leave their rooms to use the bathroom and lavatory on the landing, and was always unsmiling and complaining. The guards found her personality difficult. But she was clearly a sick woman, as was the boy, for whom they had the greatest, overriding sympathy. So thin, so pale and waxen, Alexey seemed to some of them to be already at death’s door. In the end, many of the Romanovs’ captors, for all their revolutionary talk and Bolshevik persuasions, had succumbed to simple human compassion for what was fundamentally an ordinary, devoted family, blighted by ill health and with no real understanding of their terrible new life in captivity.

  Weeks of close confinement and crushing boredom for four hormonal girls aged between 17 and 22, two of them still adolescent and all of them subject to the normal mood swings of menstruating women, must inevitably have brought tensions within those five hot, crowded rooms. Add to that a probably menopausal mother and a terminally ill brother, and the strain must at times have been intolerable. Hagiographers of the Romanovs have always claimed there was never any discord between the family, but this is extremely hard to believe given the circumstances in which they were being held and the often profound fluctuations between hope and despair that any prisoner normally goes through when kept for so long under close surveillance.

  Indeed, it may well have been the immaturity and natural sexual curiosity of one of the daughters that helped precipitate the final clampdown. On 27 June, the flirtatious and attractive Maria, whom the guards had found by far the most friendly of the Grand Duchesses, had been discovered, during an inspection of the Ipatiev House by Goloshchekin and Beloborodov, in a compromising situation with guard Ivan Skorokhodov, who had smuggled in a cake for her nineteenth birthday. Skorokhodov was summarily removed to Ekaterinburg jail. Nicholas and Alexandra, as well as Maria’s older sisters, were clearly shocked by her behaviour and unsettled by the incident. The resulting introduction of a rigorous new regime at the Ipatiev House and Avdeev’s dismissal were no coincidence.

  And so, on Thursday 4 July, a new commandant arrived. His name was Yakov Yurovsky, and he brought with him an assistant, an attractive young man called Grigory Nikulin, who in Alexandra’s estimation seemed ‘decent’ in comparison to his vulgar predecessor Moshkin. Little did she know that the bland-looking Nikulin was a ruthless killer who had opted to work for the Cheka rather than go to the Front.

  Yurovsky was a tall, well-built man with high cheekbones and a shock of black hair. With his neatly trimmed Van Dyck beard and curled moustache, the 40-year-old looked cultured, almost dapper, and had an air of self-importance to match. He wasn’t a drinker like Avdeev. He was highly intelligent, vigilant and motivated. A clampdown was needed and it would be draconian. Yurovsky immediately saw to it that pilfering from the Imperial Family ceased. Such money as the Tsar and Tsaritsa had left had already been confiscated. But after a search of their possessions on arrival, the 16 roubles and 17 kopeks given to Maria by Anastasia for the journey to Ekaterinburg had been taken from her for ‘safekeeping by the Ural Regional Soviet’s treasurer’. Yurovsky was more meticulous than Avdeev; he now set about making a detailed inventory of all the family’s jewellery and valuables. The priceless Imperial regalia had long since been confiscated by the new Soviet state; much of what remained of larger valuable pieces had been stolen, or smuggled out by the Tsaritsa to sympathisers in Tobolsk, in hopes of funding rescue. But the women still had with them many jewels – especially diamonds and pearls. At Tobolsk, during every spare moment, they had been carefully secreting these in their corsets, bodices, hats and buttons, as essential resources to fund their life in exile, should they ever have to leave Russia. Yurovsky knew they had more jewellery than the items he had seen and that they had probably concealed them in their clothes. He knew Moscow wanted to lay hands on it; and sooner or later he would find it. As he itemised the family’s valuables, he made few concessions: the Tsarevich was allowed to keep his watch (he would get bored without it, claimed Nicholas), the Tsar his engagement ring which he couldn’t get off, and the women only the gold bracelets they wore that fitted so tightly round their wrists that they could not be removed. The rest Yurovsky took away, and locked up in a box, to be returned to them later.

  In actual fact, the family had already met Yurovsky twice before when he had visited the Ipatiev House with members of the local soviet. On 26 May he had arrived when Dr Derevenko had come to see Alexey, on which occasion the family had assumed, from his unhurried and dignified manner and his concern about the Tsarevich’s health, that he too was a doctor. This afternoon, 4 July, he again asked about the swelling in Alexey’s leg. Nicholas was impressed; to his mind, ‘the dark gentleman’, as he referred to Yurovsky before he discovered his name, appeared solicitous for the family’s welfare. Perhaps the new commandant would be more accommodating about the request made that day by Dr Botkin that a priest be sent in to say mass on the coming Sunday.

  Neither Nicholas nor Alexandra appear to have inferred anything sinister from this sudden turnaround other than a necessary security measure, nor could they have known the true measure of the man now in control of their lives. Yakov Yurovsky had been born a Jew. His father, a glazier, had been sent into exile to the Jewish settlement at Kainsk in Novosibirsk province in Siberia for theft; there the young Yurovsky studied at the local Talmudic school. Yurovsky would later observe with bitter cynicism that thanks to the Tsar, he had been born ‘in prison’. Some said he was the grandson of a Polish rabbi, but in any event his family appear to have distanced themselves from their Jewish roots after moving to Tomsk, and Yurovsky himself ‘converted’ to Lutheranism in the early 1900s, perhaps necessary acts to escape religious persecution.

  Years of poverty, hunger and deprivation, as one of 10 children, had sown the seeds of profound social resentment and led him to be virulently anti-monarchist. He remembered the smell of growing up in a cramped apartment above the butcher’s shop in Tomsk. As a child, he had shared the same naïve belief as others in the Tsar’s infallible goodness. ‘I thought then one could go to the Tsar and tell him how hard our life was’, he remarked. But disillusion rapidly set in as Yurovsky developed a political and social consciousness. Soon the Tsar in whom he trusted was, in his impressionable young imagination, a ‘fiend’ a ‘bloodsucker’ and a killer. Yurovsky escaped the stultifying environment of Tomsk as soon as he could, having trained as a watchmaker, but not before serving time in jail around 1898 for an unspecified murder. He settled in Ekaterinburg where he worked in a jeweller’s shop, married in 1904 and joined the Bolshevik party in 1905. Soon after that his political activities forced him to leave Russia and he lived for several years in Berlin, where he worked as a watchmaker and also trained as a photographer. Returning to Russia in 1912, Yurovsky and his family (he had three children) lived for a while in Baku in the Caucasus, at that time a hotbed of revolutionary activity under the leadership of a young Joseph Stalin, before returning first to Tomsk and then to Ekaterinburg. Here he set up a
photographer’s studio with Nikolay Vvedensky at number 42 Pokrovsky Prospekt, next door to the city’s noisy market; it is said the premises were also a front for covert meetings of local Bolsheviks. Business boomed for Yurovsky when he started offering the new ‘electrophotographs’ which could be processed and ready in ten minutes, and he was soon co-opted into taking the official photographs of prisoners in the local jail. He and his family lived in an apartment in the centre, with a dacha at Shartash, on the outskirts of the city. But then war intervened and he was drafted into the Russian army in 1915. Because he had been suffering from rheumatism and tuberculosis, he was allowed to train as a medical orderly, thus avoiding being sent to the Front. When the Revolution came in 1917, he deserted and went home to Ekaterinburg, where he had continued to run his photographic business whilst becoming increasingly involved in local politics.

  Yurovsky was by now a totally dedicated Communist and had quickly risen from soldier deputy on the local Ekaterinburg Soviet to executive member of the Ural Regional Soviet. As a member too of the local Ekaterinburg Cheka, he operated as a commissar for justice, exhibiting the absolute self-control and cold cynicism so typical of the professional revolutionary. He kept careful control of his burning hatred for the Imperial Family, on the surface appearing polite, even punctilious. He did not suffer conflicts of feelings or a troubled conscience as had his predecessor Avdeev. Nor did his 23-year-old assistant Nikulin, a cold-blooded killer who had already had a hand in secret shootings of counter-revolutionaries and with whom Yurovsky had a very close father–son relationship. Both were fired by implacable class hatred and had come to the Ipatiev House to settle a long-standing score with the Romanovs on behalf of the Revolution.

  On the day of his arrival, Yurovsky instigated ‘a complete disinfection’ of the guard at the Ipatiev House and with it a tightening of discipline, down to the tidying away of rubbish and an insistence on the daily making up of bunks and maintenance of cleanliness. The men from the Sysert and Zlokazov works were removed from the inside guard to the outside. Overall, the Special Detachment would be increased to 86 men, with Yurovsky announcing that in a few days’ time Avdeev’s old internal guard was to be replaced with new men of his own choosing.

  Four houses and 300 yards away down Voznesensky Prospekt, in sight of the Ipatiev House, the British consul, Thomas Preston, was encountering considerable problems in obtaining any news of the welfare of the Imperial Family. He had caught a glimpse of Grand Duchess Maria when the convoy bringing the Tsar and Tsaritsa from the railway station had passed his door on 30 April, but had not been allowed to see the family at all, despite their close ties with the British Royal Family. (Alexandra’s mother was King George V’s aunt, and Nicholas and George’s Danish mothers were sisters.) Whilst the Red Flag now flew over the city’s civic buildings, Preston had kept the British Union Jack conspicuously defiant at his own consulate. But for weeks now he had been experiencing great difficulty in getting telegrams out to his Foreign Office back home. The service was intermittent and those telegrams that did get through were often intercepted by the Bolsheviks.

  Preston knew the city well; he had been in the Urals since 1903, as representative of a Leeds-based mining company prospecting there for platinum. He had married a Russian wife and in 1916, thanks to his fluent Russian and detailed local knowledge, had been asked to take on the role of British consul in Ekaterinburg. With the Urals and Western Siberia being completely isolated from the outside world, Preston had rapidly found himself left with ‘a kind of enforced carte blanche’ to deal with local affairs, often without instruction from the British government. Much more importantly, he had a specific brief to keep a close watch on the Urals platinum industry on behalf of the British War Office. His deputy, a Cornishman named Arthur Thomas, was also a skilled mining engineer, recruited from a British firm, Holman Brothers Limited, that had been mining platinum in the Urals. For either of them to act assertively now in support of the Romanovs, with a new and volatile Bolshevik government in control, was becoming an increasingly dangerous thing to do.

  During June, several of the Romanov entourage who had accompanied the children from Tobolsk had remained at Ekaterinburg station. Whilst living in a fourth-class railway carriage awaiting safe passage out of the city, they had taken to daily badgering Preston to do something to help the Imperial Family, as too had Prince Dolgorukov, in pencil-written notes smuggled out from his prison cell. The Tsarevich’s two tutors, Sidney Gibbes and Pierre Gilliard, and lady-in-waiting Baroness Sophie von Buxhoeveden (who had been refused permission to join the family at the Ipatiev House) had been particularly insistent, and had even made personal representations to the Ural Regional Soviet. Day in, day out they would make their way to the British consulate and spend long hours discussing with Preston all and any possible ways of saving the Imperial Family. But eventually these three had been put on a train back to Tobolsk.

  Nevertheless, other Romanov loyalists, both covertly and overtly, had been congregating in the city, including Princess Helena of Serbia, wife of Prince Ioann Konstantinovich, who was now being held under arrest with the Tsaritsa’s sister at Alapaevsk. Helena had had the temerity to go up to the Ipatiev House and demand of the sentries who confronted her with rifles raised that she see the Tsar. Secretly she had hoped also to be able to pass on letters from their relatives that she had smuggled in with her. Her visit was of course refused by Avdeev, who was taken aback by such boldness, but the princess continued to make a nuisance of herself at the Cheka headquarters at the Amerikanskaya Hotel half a mile down the road from the Ipatiev House, on the corner of Pokrovsky Prospekt and Zlatoustovskaya Street. Finally, tiring of her persistent enquiries, the Cheka took her off to the local prison and two weeks later she was put on a train back to Petrograd.

  Princess Helena’s impetuous behaviour had made Preston’s delicate negotiations on behalf of the Romanovs doubly difficult, but nevertheless, under pressure on all sides, day after day the beleaguered British consul would walk up to the soviet offices at the railway station to make enquiries on behalf of the entire consular corps. To do so meant running the gauntlet of men bristling with rifles, pistols and grenades. Ekaterinburg railway station was a far from inviting place to visit, he later recalled: ‘the stench was nauseating, the atmosphere charged with the odour of unwashed bodies, dirty boots and the foul-smelling makhorka [cheap Russian tobacco] they all smoked’. Outside, the station platforms were crowded with disconsolate, dirty, lice-ridden peasants waiting around with their bundles – hoping for a train, any train, to take them out of the city. Meanwhile, yards away from so much squalor, in the station’s first-class restaurant, newly created soviet officials wined and dined and played cards. It was, said Preston, ‘one of the first mockeries I saw of the so-called egalitarian society’.

  In his office at the station, Preston found Sergey Chutskaev, of the Ural Regional Soviet, a dirty, greasy man in a leather jacket, with baggy sharovary (sailor’s trousers) tucked into his top boots, lounging in an anteroom strewn with weapons. He told Chutskaev that he and his American and French colleagues had heard rumours that the Imperial Family were being badly treated and that their governments were becoming increasingly concerned for their welfare. As usual, he got the same unconvincing assurances from Chutskaev that the family were all in good health and in no danger. Preston knew he was being fed a lie – he had been getting the same phoney assurances for weeks – but nevertheless he dutifully telegraphed this news on to his government in the hope that some of his communiqués would get through. The Bolsheviks he knew were becoming increasingly hostile to his enquiries, and Chutskaev had threatened him with arrest for his meddlesome behaviour. In fact, he had even told Preston, in a moment of chilling flippancy, that he couldn’t make up his mind whether or not to shoot him. No wonder Preston was of the view that the members of the city’s new soviet operated like a gang of brigands: ‘a more awe-inspiring and cut-throat crowd would be hard to find’.

  The increasin
gly unstable situation in Ekaterinburg was plain to see everywhere; it clearly belied Chutskaev’s hollow assertions that the Romanovs were in no danger. From the moment the Bolsheviks, supported by politicised railway workers, had taken control in the Urals and seized the city the previous November, Ekaterinburg had been living under a regime that governed by fear. Prior to the Revolution, the Urals population at large had kept a low profile in Russian political life, and for this reason the most experienced agitators had been sent out from Petrograd to propagandise among the largely negative peasant population. At the end of May, 500 militant sailor-revolutionaries from Kronstadt had also descended on the city to ensure the new Bolshevik government was ‘not being too lenient’. They assaulted and raped women, attacked and murdered members of the local bourgeoisie and raided the local distillery for vodka, distributing it to the mob.

  One by one the symbols of the old tsarist system were destroyed. The statue of assassinated Tsar Alexander II that occupied pride of place in the city square was torn down. The homes of the much-despised capitalist bourgeoisie were searched and looted of any valuables, and the houses themselves summarily requisitioned and divided up as accommodation for workers. In late June, those of the well-to-do possessed of more than 10,000 roubles were forcibly sent to dig trenches against the advancing Czechs, 67 citizens being sent to the Front on the 25th. Shops were vandalised, their windows smashed; others were closed down, their goods confiscated and their owners ruined, if they hadn’t already been chased out. The hotels one by one shut their doors. The state-run mines and factories and workshops were taken over and nationalised. Civic institutions and businesses lost their educated and skilled workers, many of whom were hounded out as class enemies, thus ensuring, counter-productively, that there was nobody left with the expertise to run them. Everywhere private enterprise was repressed and destroyed, including the flourishing commercial river and rail transport of the region. All the banks and telegraph offices, the post office and printing presses were taken over, the local newspapers replaced with the monopoly of Bolshevik propaganda in the grandly named News of the Ural Regional Soviet of Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Phone lines were cut and the handsets thrown in the river. Societies and clubs were banned and all public meetings, except Communist ones, forbidden. One by one, the city’s fine civic buildings fell into neglect, their windows cracked and dirty, their floors unswept and muddied by dirty boots. And now there were sentries with rifles at every doorway.